Product Description

In a world where loyalties are easily abandoned and allegiances can be bought, a new and deadlier terrorist threat has emergedfree agent killers! Featuring high-octane action (Gene Shalit, Today ), a first-rate cast (L.A. Daily News) and exhilarating

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13435 in DVD
• Brand: Ronin
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Number of discs: 30
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 122 minutes

Features

• TESTED

Amazon.com essential video
Robert De Niro stars as an American intelligence operative adrift in irrelevance since the end of the Cold War--much like a masterless samurai, a.k.a. "ronin." With his services for sale, he joins a renegade, international team of fellow covert warriors with nothing but time on their hands. Their mission, as defined by the woman who hires them (Natascha McElhone), is to get hold of a particular suitcase that is equally coveted by the Russian mafia and Irish terrorists. As the scheme gets underway, De Niro's lone wolf strikes up a rare friendship with his French counterpart (Jean Reno), gets into a more-or-less romantic frame of mind with McElhone, and asserts his experience on the planning and execution of the job--going so far as to publicly humiliate one team member (Sean Bean) who is clearly out of his league. The story is largely unremarkable--there's an obligatory twist midway through that changes the nature of the team's business--but legendary filmmaker John Frankenheimer (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) leaps at the material, bringing to it an honest tension and seasoned, breathtaking skill with precision-action direction. The centerpiece of the movie is an honest-to-God car chase that is the real thing: not the how-can-we-top-the-last-stunt cartoon nonsense of Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), but a pulse-quickening, kinetic dance of superb montage and timing. In a sense, Ronin is almost Frankenheimer's self-quoting version of a John Frankenheimer film. There isn't anything here he hasn't done before, but it's sure great to see it all again. --Tom Keogh

Amazon.com
Robert De Niro stars as an American intelligence operative adrift in irrelevance since the end of the Cold War--much like a masterless samurai, a.k.a. "ronin." With his services for sale, he joins a renegade, international team of fellow covert warriors with nothing but time on their hands. Their mission, as defined by the woman who hires them (Natascha McElhone), is to get hold of a particular suitcase that is equally coveted by the Russian mafia and Irish terrorists. As the scheme gets underway, De Niro's lone wolf strikes up a rare friendship with his French counterpart (Jean Reno), gets into a more-or-less romantic frame of mind with McElhone, and asserts his experience on the planning and execution of the job--going so far as to publicly humiliate one team member (Sean Bean) who is clearly out of his league. The story is largely unremarkable--there's an obligatory twist midway through that changes the nature of the team's business--but legendary filmmaker John Frankenheimer (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) leaps at the material, bringing to it an honest tension and seasoned, breathtaking skill with precision-action direction. The centerpiece of the movie is an honest-to-God car chase that is the real thing: not the how-can-we-top-the-last-stunt cartoon nonsense of Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), but a pulse-quickening, kinetic dance of superb montage and timing. In a sense, Ronin is almost Frankenheimer's self-quoting version of a John Frankenheimer film. There isn't anything here he hasn't done before, but it's sure great to see it all again. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
A tense return to form, and to France, by director John Frankenheimer. Decades after "The Train" and "French Connection II," he takes us to Paris and the Riviera, and to the murky mission that's been assigned to a bunch of freelance spies; these are played by Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan SkarsgÅrd, Sean Bean, and Skipp Sudduth, while the object of the assignment is played with grace and wit by a large suitcase. All they have to do, under the guidance of a young Irishwoman (Natascha McElhone), is steal the case; the movie derives its peculiar flavor from the combination of that simple task and the furtive, fateful complications that cluster around it. In the manner of director Jean-Pierre Melville, whom he knew and admired, Frankenheimer likes to launch his action sequences from patches of sombre suspense; the men sit around in hotel rooms, then go out for a car chase. After a while, you stop counting the chases-they just get longer and louder, and it's like watching the revival of a forgotten art form; the fact that it's done with a minimum of special effects makes it all the more stirring. With Jonathan Pryce as an Irish danger man and Michael Lonsdale as a hairy sage. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker